More Bitter Than Death (8 page)

“More coffee,” I said.

“Me too,” said Lissa.

“And a bagel, toasted, with cream cheese,” I said. “Please.”

But Eleni did not seem to be registering our presence, much less our needs. She was looking at the cook, a young man frenetically wielding a spatula by the grill.

“Busy today,” I observed, trying to get her attention back to us and our order.

She sighed. “I had a helluva night last night.”

Eleni didn’t strike me as having a lot on the ball, so I asked her to bring my check, too, when she returned with the food. She nodded, distracted again, and shambled away. Her feet scuffed along the ground like she was wearing bedroom slippers.

“She had a helluva night last night,” I informed Lissa.

Lissa put down her cup and glared at Eleni’s back. She drew a deep breath, as if she was going to tell me exactly what she thought of Eleni’s late night, then found the effort too much, and settled for another sip of coffee.

Ten long minutes later, we got another carafe of coffee, and I got my bagel. The coffee was again surprisingly good, and Lissa and I had eventually worked our way up to communicating with meaningful grunts and squeaks.

“Eve didn’t eat an apple,” Lissa said, at last.

“Huh?”

“She ate coffee beans. That was what was on the tree of knowledge.”

“Ah.” I wiped my mouth and pushed my chair back.

“Emma, mind if I take your place?” Jay had materialized behind me; he looked like he’d been up way too late last night.

“Knock yourself out,” I said, throwing my napkin down.

“Lissa says you saw the ghost last night,” he said, sitting down and shoving my cup out of his way.

“Lissa’s a drama queen and a damned gossip,” I replied. “I didn’t see anything, I heard a noise. There was no ghost.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, then said, “Someone’s got to keep things from getting too serious around here.”

“Like that’s a problem. I’ve gotta run, I want to get down to the session a little early to introduce myself,” I said. “Later, guys.”

“Knock ’em dead, Em,” Lissa called after me.

I waved and headed for the partitioned ballroom where I found Scott pacing once again at the back of the meeting space. He was so big and the space so small that he could have used a tug boat.

“Good, Chris found you?” he said. He was wearing a blue rosette that said “President.” It might as well have been a target.

“Yep. No sign of Garrison?” I asked.

“Nope.” Scott’s pen was clicking away like mad. “He’s always done this, decides that he’s not bothered, or uninterested, or that this is all beneath him, or is off staring at dust motes or something. But you’d think this once, he’d cut it out.”

I shrugged. “If he shows up, I’ll hand it over to him.”

Suddenly, a burden had tumbled off his back and the sun broke through the clouds. “Thanks, Em. I appreciate it. I’ll get you a drink later.”

“You can get me two drinks later; I was supposed to be taking it easy this weekend,” I groused. “Half the reason I worked so hard to get off the board was to get out of getting up so early.”

He smiled broadly, knowing that I was only kidding, and I remembered why we were friends. “Okay, two drinks. The good stuff. You’re a peach.”

I find it absurdly sweet when Scott calls me a peach, for some reason. Maybe it’s the novelty of the name, which is so old-fashioned, maybe it’s Scott himself, who really did work hard to make things come out right for everyone. Scott left to see if he could locate Garrison—again—and I introduced myself to the members of the session. Since I was just there to keep time and introduce folks, I didn’t have to say anything particularly clever, which was good, because the session was on European tobacco pipe manufacturers. While, like every good archaeologist, I have a set of drill bits in my bag—to measure the diameter of the pipe stem bores to get an idea of the manufacturing date—any further expertise was limited to where to get started looking in the library. Maybe I’d pick up something edifying today.

After I checked in with the presenters and made sure they were all ready and accounted for, I explained to the audience that I’d be moderating instead of Dr. Garrison, who was presently unavailable, and got right down to the business of introducing the first thirty-minute paper.

Instead of sitting down in the front row, I hung out over by the side of the room, near the light switches, to keep that end of things running smoothly at least. Standing up kept me from falling asleep, and it gave me a good view of the audience as they settled in for the talks. A few latecomers straggled in, glancing nervously around to make sure they weren’t disturbing anyone, but the last stayed by the door, holding it open to finish a whispered conversation with
someone outside the room. I frowned, and was just about to sneak back and ask whomever it was to come in or go out, when the door quietly shut, and I realized I was glaring at Duncan Thayer. That jerked me out of the sleepiness that was stealing over me.

Unlike the others, he didn’t seem to mind whether he was disrupting anyone, and he stepped into room, but stood to the side of the door, as if he wouldn’t be staying long. He eventually glanced around, an old trick of his, to see who was here, and saw me staring at him. He gave me a casual nod of the head, a you-know-how-it-is-at-these-things gesture, and I raised an eyebrow, and pointedly returned my attention to the speaker, who was going on about the change in marks over time in a pipe factory in southwest England. Nothing drove Duncan crazier than the idea that someone could resist him.

The next two papers rounded out the first ninety minutes, and in the middle of the fourth, there was another, louder disturbance by the door. Again I could see that Duncan was involved, and now faces—including that of the speaker—were turning toward them and back to me. I rushed to the back of the room while the speaker continued hesitantly, not knowing whether he should stop.

“Could you please keep it down,” I hissed. I looked from Duncan to the person he’d been speaking with and saw to my surprise that it was Scott, who looked pale as a sheet of paper and slick with sweat. “What’s wrong?”

He took my arm and pulled me out of the room. Duncan followed.

“We found Garrison, Em.” Scott swallowed a couple of times. “He’s…he’s dead.”

“Oh, jeez,” I said, shoulders slumping. “What was it, his heart or something?”

“They found him outside. They think it was exposure, but it might have been his head.”

“What do you mean? Like a stroke?”

“I dunno, it could be.” Scott looked off, then straight at me. “He was out on the pond behind the hotel. Out on the ice. There was a hell of a lot of blood. His head was split open.”

“T
HEY SAID IT LOOKED LIKE HE FELL ON THE ICE
, and cracked his head open,” Scott continued. He was shaking like a leaf, and it scared me to see him so. He exchanged a look with Duncan, and I found myself suppressing an urge to shoo Duncan away.

But of course he was looking at Duncan; they were at New Hampshire College at the same time. Under Garrison.

“Okay, do you want me to make an announcement?” I asked. “What are we supposed to do in this situation?”

“I don’t know. What I want to do is wait until the authorities can make their way here and take care of the body. I don’t want to make any formal announcements until we hear from them, and that’s going to take a while because of the weather. I’m hoping it won’t get around too much, but you know how gossip moves.”

“Who found him anyway?” I said.

“One of the hotel people gave me the news. One of their people went to get a snowblower out of the utility shed down by the lake.”

I looked at Scott closely; he was still sweating and his face was now gray. “Are you going to be okay?”

He shook his head. “Yeah, but I think I want to sit down for a bit.”

“Let’s go over there.” I indicated a couch flanked by two end tables with ghastly, oversized silk floral arrangements badly in need of dusting. As I put my arm around his shoulders, I bumped into Duncan’s hand. Although my first instinct was to pull away, I wasn’t about to make a scene in front of Scott.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

“No, that’s all right, Emma,” Duncan replied. “Why don’t you go back to the session?”

“Why don’t you go and—” I took a breath. “Scott was looking for me. I’m fine here.”

“Actually I was looking for—” Scott began, then sat heavily onto the couch. “I was looking for Dunk. But I’m glad you’re here too, Em. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

“Right, sure, anything,” I said, nodding quickly. “Do you want some water?”

“That’d be great.”

“I’ll get it,” Duncan said before I could answer.

I sat next to Scott, whose head was in his hands. I put my hand on his back, and waited for him.

“It’s just so strange,” he kept saying to the carpet. “The man was a force of nature. Not that he was Superman or anything, he was old, and was feeling his years. Healthwise, I mean. But his personality, for whatever faults you might have seen in him, was just huge.”

I chose to take Scott’s “you” as the general one, and not me personally. Duncan had returned with a glass of ice water from the coffee table.

“I just can’t believe that he’s…that he won’t ever…ever again.”

“It’s the end of an era,” Duncan said.

I wanted to tell him to shut up, and I almost did, but then I saw Scott nodding again. I bristled, thinking it wrong that Duncan should also have history with Scott, who was
my
friend; territoriality, especially under these circumstances, is not my best look.

“Yep. Now we need a plan. I want to wait until the business meeting tonight, to make a general announcement. That will give me a chance to talk to the board and to call his family; I think that would be best, even if the authorities contact them too. If we address it tonight, we can get that over with, maybe have a few speeches and a moment of silence, or something, and carry on with things tomorrow.”

I opened my mouth to protest, we couldn’t possibly carry on, and then realized that of course we could. We should. “Right.”

“He always said that there was no excuse for not handing in work, and even a death certificate wouldn’t be sufficient, as you should have anticipated it and planned your work accordingly,” Duncan said.

Automatically I checked for whether he was being sincere, but I didn’t see any of the telltale signs that would indicate otherwise. Scott cut me off in my thoughts.

“Yeah, you’re right.” Scott turned and smiled ruefully at Duncan, then gave himself a shake. “Right, thanks guys, I’m feeling better. Let’s say if I need you to do anything, I’ll leave a message in your rooms or on the message board. Okay?”

I nodded and glanced at my watch. “Sounds good. I’ve got to get back in there and finish up this session. With any luck, the paper hasn’t ended early. As if that ever happens. I’m really sorry, Scott.”

He nodded. “Me too. Figures it happens when I’m the one running the show. Old bastard.”

But he said it fondly, not with any of the real ire that I’d always heard from Grandpa Oscar and sometimes used my
self. Duncan nodded, of course, and said to Scott, “Walk and talk with me.”

I got up and left abruptly, hearing him say “Good-bye, Emma,” from behind me. I waved my hand without looking back.

As I suspected, I got back to my post just in time to give the “one minute, wrap it up” signal. To my relief, no one much noticed my hasty departure, and things seemed quite as usual. The reader obligingly finished, fairly smoothly, and I got up to announce my own student, Katie Bell, whose paper I was planning to see in any case.

Several things happened at once. As I announced Katie’s name and her paper title, I heard a roar of laughter from the session right next door to us. That meant that they were running over, but it also meant that my little surprise for Carla had been discovered, just about on time. I also noticed that Katie kept looking around, disappointment evident on her features. As she fiddled with her scrunchie, which was too big for the ponytail it held, I realized that she hoped that Garrison would appear in time for her paper. I couldn’t tell her that wasn’t going to happen, but I did give an extra flourish to my introduction, which brought a smile to her long narrow face.

I don’t know why I should have been nervous for Katie, except that she was young, just a senior, and this was her first paper. All on her own, she was showing enough nervous energy to power a small factory, but I had vetted her paper at her request, made some suggestions, and she swore that she’d practiced reading it out loud to her roommates. It was good experience, and I didn’t think it would do her any harm, but she was high-strung as a new tightrope and as jittery as the first person to try it out. I guess I just felt for her.

She started off okay—she’d managed to clear her throat away from the mike and didn’t go three octaves higher than
her normal voice—and was actually doing well reading the paper, which was on the smoking pipes from the Fort Providence assemblages. I actually found myself leaning forward, eager to hear her next words about a site I’d researched and excavated myself, until she went disastrously off script.

She lost her place, which led to several seconds of stuttering. Then she took a deep breath and a drink of water, just like I’d told her to do if she got hung up somewhere. Then, for some reason, she started talking about the slide that was showing a preliminary overview of the site with the location of the units superimposed over it. She was starting to repeat what she’d already said at the beginning, and worse, seemed to be spiraling downward into needless detail. I sat on my hands and tried to find the right moment to correct her course, biting my lip in anxious sympathy.

“—and the crew used trowels—not the roundy, gardening kind, but flat mason’s trowels—to dig. They followed the existing stratigraphy, the layers of soil that were deposited by wind, water, or human landscaping, until they hit the glacially deposited sand, which meant there would be no human artifacts below that, because there were no people around here before the glaciers. As far as we know.”

Aw, hell, Katie, I thought, you don’t need to go into this basic stuff, not with this crowd. Grandma doesn’t like being taught how to suck eggs. I considered clearing my throat, trying to get her to go back to her discussion of the site and the goodies, but imagined it would throw her off balance even more, and then she’d be explaining about how the Europeans had actually started regularly visiting this side of the ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that the Indians had been here a good long stretch before that.

Her extemporaneous ramblings seemed to peter out and she faltered, looking around the darkened room nervously. She caught my eye and I just about strained something, simultaneously trying to look reassuring, urge her on, and in
dicate that she should get back to the substance of her paper. She nodded, found her place, and began to read again, moving through the text smoothly, once in a while looking out to the audience, and pausing occasionally to point out something in one of her slides. She didn’t go too fast, she read the paper as if she was familiar with its contents, and she remembered to breathe normally. I began to relax as she did, and found myself nodding as she hit the right beats about the pottery and the military artifacts. When she showed the slide of the tiny early pipe-bowl fragment, which was our present pride and joy, unearthed during the last field season, there was an appreciative murmur through the crowd that made her flush with pride.

At last she finished, just a minute ahead of schedule.

“Thanks, Katie, well done,” I said.

Katie’d done a good job overall, but she again looked like a deer in the headlights. For an instant, I thought she was going to stay frozen up there as the polite clapping for her petered out; I moved to announce the final speaker, thinking I would have to nudge her back to her seat, when a louder ovation, more raucous than the rest of the audience, came from the back of the room. I peered through the lights and saw a cadre of graduate students, led by Meg Garrity, standing at the back, clapping and shouting for Katie. She flushed and smiled, collected up her paper and her water, and ducked her head, giving them an embarrassed little hand flick as she found her way back to her seat.

“Our last speaker, Michelle Lima, will be presenting her paper entitled ‘English and Dutch Pipes in the Mid-Atlantic Colonies Before Seventeen Fifty.’ Michelle?”

Michelle was right on cue, coming up the stairs as I was going down. I stopped to let her pass, and she leaned over to speak in my ear.

“You going to be at the Grope later, honeycakes?” she whispered.

“But of course, my darling Misha-lima. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“And it wouldn’t be a party without you.” She got to the lectern and in a much different, fully professional voice, said, “Thank you, Emma,” and began her paper.

After the questions at the end of the session, I found Katie out in the hallway, and congratulated her, moving her out of the crowd intent on finding their ways to the next papers. “That was great! And look, you were able to walk away! Very far from what you were predicting back on campus.”

She twisted her presentation pages into a tube. “I got nervous. Could you tell? I just lost my place for a minute, and then I started thinking about who was out there, listening to me, and I just started babbling. I looked like an idiot.”

“Naw. I think people knew that you were a little nervous, but that’s okay, and you recovered really well, and that’s the name of the game, right? And then you finished up like a pro, so that was more than ninety percent that went smoother than silk.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She stuck the tube between her knees, trying to recapture the escaping scrunchie. “I was kinda disappointed that Professor Garrison didn’t show up. I really wanted to meet him, today. I mean, especially since I got into his session rather than the general one on pipe studies.”

I thought, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me—

Katie hesitated, then looked up. “If we see him later, would you introduce me to him? I’d really like that, because I wanted to ask him about some of the stuff in his book on West Devon factories.”

I really wanted to tell her, but I also wanted to respect Scott’s wishes about how he announced the news of Garrison’s death. “Look, he’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes. We’ll see what we can do, okay?”

When I saw the eager look on her face, I couldn’t resist adding, “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, is all.”

She nodded. “That’s okay, that’s fine. I gotta go, I wanted to catch another paper at twelve and I don’t want to be late.”

“Okay, see you later, Katie.”

She practically sprang away and loped off to her next session, her slide carousel left forgotten by the projector. I went to retrieve it, and found Meg waiting for me outside after.

“Nice of you guys to come by to support Katie,” I said. “I think she really appreciated it.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not a bad kid,” Meg replied. “And we all knew that she was wicked nervous. She kept going on and on about it, so Neal and I figured we’d let her get it out of her system and then get her good and drunk tonight.”

Wicked? I thought. More of Neal’s New England speech patterns must be rubbing off on our transplanted Ms. Garrity than I imagined; although Meg had traveled all over as part of a military family, most of her accent seemed to have been developed in the western United States. “Of course, you’ve all taken into consideration that she is actually of legal drinking age? That she in fact imbibes?”

“Katie? Oh God, yes. Why do you think the other undergrads call her ‘Sandbag’? Because the morning after a party is the one time that she isn’t rocketing around like a spaz.” She looked at me, conceding the point. “And she turned twenty-one over the Thanksgiving break.”

Was spaz back into the common parlance? It never took more than a few moments with any of my students to plumb the exact depths of the generation gap that separated us.

“She’s eager,” I said. “I’m sure you were exactly the same way, when you were younger.”

Meg gave me a cool and long-practiced glance.

I shrugged. “Okay, maybe you weren’t.”

“Were you?”

“I don’t know that I was as hyper as Katie, but I had a lot of practice in how to behave at conferences. Not everyone grows up with this coming to them like second nature, right?
But the thing is I remember how Katie feels. Perhaps you can recall some similar—though not, of course, identically expressed—feeling?”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Maybe.”

I wasn’t letting her off the hook that easy. “And the great thing about being young and immature is that you eventually outgrow it, right?” I insisted.